"That’s one of the hardest things that a person can go through. It’s not like somebody calls and says, your father just passed away. You know how, you know what time, you know what day. You know everything. It’s a sickening feeling. A very sickening feeling. It was torture. It was."

"When I explained my question to the woman who answered the phone, I told her I was calling about the property at 924 North 25th Street, in Milwaukee’s Avenues West neighborhood. When this didn’t seem to remind her of anything, I laid all my cards on the table. 'You know,' I said. 'Where Jeffrey Dahmer used to live. Uh—why did you buy that lot?'

"'Good question!' she said, in the Midwestern mix of aggression and politeness I was still getting used to after moving to Wisconsin that fall. Then she put me through to an answering machine. I never heard back."

"In a world that told me a girl could not desire, I dreamed myself into boyhood. If a boy kissed a boy—if a boy let a boy kiss him—no one had to lose, no one had to submit, no one had to be asking for it, or for whatever came next. You could just—kiss."

"For neither the first nor the last time during the case, Anna Nicole Smith is at a loss for words, but this time she doesn’t seem angry or ashamed. Instead, she smiles, perhaps at the memory of the time when a powerful man’s desire to take care of her was the driving force in his life, and he was powerful enough to make the whole world want to take care of her, too."

"It’s not difficult to understand how a story that breaks a small town’s heart can deprive onlookers of the will to look at these complexities. It’s far more difficult to argue that, on a national scale, outrage can be our only response to crimes like these. "

"The real problem with 'Twin Peaks' was not that it lost its energy after solving its central mystery, but that it dared to keep airing at all: In all the experience viewers had with such narratives, the story had to end with the young woman’s killer brought to justice, the righting of the wrong, the return to grace."

"'I am strangled!' cried the servant girl, though the only hands around her throat were her own. She shrieked and laughed and wept uncontrollably, spat at those who tried to restrain her, and said she feared for her life. At one moment she appeared terrified, and in the next seemed to possess some strange power: she looked her masters in the eye, and spoke to them as equals."

"When Sue Klebold viewed her son’s body, she was, she writes in her memoir A Mother’s Reckoning, 'overcome by a compulsive, almost biological need to make Dylan warm. I could not stop rubbing his ice-cold arms, exposed by the short-sleeved hospital gown he was wearing. I had to hold myself back from climbing into the casket so I could cover him with the warmth of my body.'"

"'Something was happening to me, something strange. It had to do with the fact that no one was treating me like garbage…. One of the crew members did something funny—I can no longer remember what—but everyone started laughing, and I was laughing along with the rest of them. I was laughing along with the rest of them. And I thought my face would break.'"